“History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.”
E. H. Carr, What Is History?
“IF I WERE ASKED why I think our whole industrial society is cursed with sterility and stamped with the mark of the slave, I could give a great many answers, but one will serve for the moment: because it cannot create a custom. It can only create a fashion. Now a fashion is simply something that has failed to be a custom. It is changed as a fashion because it is a failure as a custom. The rich, who are the most restless of mankind, do one thing after another, and prove in the very process that they cannot create anything that is good enough to last. Their succession of fashions is in itself a succession of failures. For when men have made really dignified and humane things they have always desired that they should remain; or, at least, that some relic of them should remain. We have statues of all schools of statuary and buildings of all periods of architecture. But fashion, in the feverish sense that exists to-day, is a totally different thing, a merely destructive thing; indeed, an entirely negative thing. It is as if a man were perpetually carving a statue and smashing it as soon as he carved it; as if he were always clumsily fumbling with the clay and had never modelled it to his liking. It is as if people began to dig up the foundations of a house before they had finished putting the roof on... ”
G.K. Chesterton “Poetry in Action” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022) p. 6 [including start]
“Stupid kills”
Another of mine, from June 2003
“There is, you know, such a thing as being too intellectual in your approach to a problem. He [Truman] believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all.”
Clark Clifford, quoted in an article in The Economist August 1, 1992 [if it had a byline I did not record it; it was evidently something Clifford “then a bright young man” said later than his time in that administration].
“‘There is no nation so atheistic that it does not attribute a sanctity to two gods, the dead man and the woman in travail.’”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Fr. James V. Schall. S.J. in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #1 (Sept. 04) [apparently originally in “The Mystery of Patriotism” in The Commonwealth Jan. 19, 1902]
“’her reception o’ me this blessed day, whilk I excuse on account of perturbation of mind, was muckle on the north side o’ friendly…’”
Baillie Nicol Jarvie in Sir Walter Scott Rob Roy
In my latest Epoch Times column I comment on the curious absence, at the just-concluded and disastrously failed COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, of any meaningful discussion of science.
“A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”
The United States Military Academy Cadet Honor Code, quoted in William H. McRaven The Wisdom of the Bullfrog. McRaven adds that “Below the honor code is the mission of the United States Military Academy. The mission of West Point is not to produce Pattonesque geniuses, four-star generals, or presidents of the United States. The mission is to produce ‘leaders of character’. And the honor code provides the foundation of that character. The code beckons young men and women who aspire ‘to live above the common level of life.’”